The primary contents of women’s fashion magazines are fashion, beauty and
health. This paper sets out to explore the ways in which international fashion
magazines such as Elle, Vogue and Marie Claire portray feminine beauty in
textual and advertising matter and how their readers react to such portrayals.
Beauty is analysed as grooming practice, and make-up as the prime symbol of
the self and its many facets in social interaction. The paper looks at the different
kinds of ‘face’ that magazines invite their women readers to put on and
suggests that they – and their advertisers – adopt a ‘technology of enchantment’
as a means of exercise control over them. Magazine and advertising language is
imbued with ‘magical’ power, and the paper shows how the structure of
advertisements closely parallels that of magical spells used in certain healing
rituals. It concludes by using magazine reader interviews to learn the extent to
which women do or do not believe in such ‘spells’ and whether they are
encouraged to buy into the ‘beauty myth’.

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This paper examines perfume advertising within the overall context of theoretical approaches to the study of smell. Pointing out that smell is marked by a paucity of language, it proceeds to examine how smell is represented in perfume advertisements. Based on an analysis of more than 250 ads worldwide, the paper asks if there are any consistent relations between language, colours and smell materials, as well as between models’ poses, seasons, and classes of perfume (floral, oriental, woody, and so on). It proceeds to survey a number of writings linking colour with smell, and suggests that olfactory marketing should, perhaps, be more consistent in its linking of these two domains in advertising and packaging.

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This working paper – written for inclusion as a chapter on Japanese society, to be
published in Chinese by the Beijing University of Foreign Studies later in 2011 – looks at
popular culture as a form of cultural production. It argues for the need to study popular
cultural forms like advertisements, ceramics, fashion magazines and folk art as both
products and as processes of design, manufacture, distribution, appreciation and use, which
must all be taken into account. Precisely because popular cultural forms are both cultural
products and commodities, they reveal the complementary nature of the two categories of
culture and the economy. The paper outlines and analyses the different ways in which
social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital are converted by those participating in
advertising, ceramic, fashion magazine and folk art worlds, and suggests that popular
culture may best be seen as a name economy.